


Your Shadow Flat on the Wall

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/M, Happy Birthday Jess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:41:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25501543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: On the bi-annual occasion of Palamedes Sextus sleeping in, Camilla Hect gets a phone call.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 9
Kudos: 109





	Your Shadow Flat on the Wall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heliocharis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliocharis/gifts).



> Now with [art](https://aparticularlygoodfinder.tumblr.com/post/624587465754361856/happy-belated-birthday-to-heliocharis-whom) by @necromanticatheart!
> 
> _Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow flat on the wall_  
>  -Visible World, Richard Siken

Camilla Hect sleeps the sleep of the righteous, the sleep of the having-sumbitted-your-thesis-revisions-exactly-on-time, the sleep of one who has woken up to the ghost of their weekday alarm on a saturday, gotten off, and promptly dozed off again. Camilla Hect skirts the edges of consciousness, dabbles in being very slightly awake, the way someone dips their hand in running water. The sheets are cool. Palamedes, hunched around her like she’s the only port in a storm, is very warm, the way he is only ever warm when sleeping. His arm is flung across her ribs, one hand curled loosely around her wrist, thumb stroking back and forth over the bone.

Cam fumbles for her phone. 9:35.

There is sun, a perfect, buttercup-custard pool of it spilling over them, cut up into perfect yellow ribbons by the Venetian blinds, or what’s left of the gap-toothed, deeply, exhaustively, fucked-up Venetian blinds. Palamedes noses at her jaw, a warm brown blur, lazy and incoherent, and hitches his knee over her hip.

Cam fumbles for her phone. 10:3— _fuck_.

She bolts upright, jolting Palamedes off her chest. He groans, glaring blindy through his eyelashes.

“I was so comfortable,” he slurs wretchedly, folding himself over a pillow, “ _why?_ ”

“I have a phone call,” she murmurs, smoothing back the single lock of his hair long enough for a cowlick.

(It is _such_ a cowlick, somehow perpendicular and diagonal to the rest of his hair at the same time.)

Palamedes makes a disgusted, petulant noise. The craggy ridge of his naked back roils with disdain.

“It’s _Saturday_.”

“It’s important.”

She tucks her phone into her shoulder, sheets pooled around her waist, and only just manages to arrange her gaping, threadbare tank top into the vaguest semblance of “dressed” before the call comes through.

“Dr Zeta!” Cam hears herself say, and she sounds mostly awake, even while she’s quietly trying to lick the cottony morning-film off the backs of her teeth.

Dr. Juno Zeta’s voice on the line is bright and throaty, something like the taste of Assam tea, with the barest whisper of formaldehyde rasp. She says:

“I looked over the revisions you sent me—thank you, by the way, for getting those to me on time, unlike _some peop—_ but we won’t get into that; I looked things over, and I do have some thoughts…”

Dr Juno Zeta’s thoughts are.

Comprehensive.

Cam loses track of the time almost entirely, alternately fluffing Palamedes’ cowlick into a ludicrous spike, and smoothing it down again.

“...Pent, no doubt, will have something to say about it, but you let me deal with her,” Juno drawls, and then:

“Is my son there?”

Cam blinks.

Not a word. Not one word to her, not one word to Harrow, or Gideon, or anyone else they know, and Cam thinks, at the exact same time, _how does she **know**_ and _of **course** she knows._

Juno Zeta knows everything.

The fact bows Cam’s shoulders into a rueful slump, one temple propped on her knuckles.

“I’ll ask him,” she sighs

She nudges his shoulder with her knee until he lifts his head, grey-eyed and baleful.

“Your mother wants to know if you’re here.”

She can see him think, at the exact same time, _how does she **know**_ and _of **course** she knows._

Then he buries his face in the pillow again, flapping his hand at her.

“Tell her I’m asleep,” he mumbles.

Cam tilts her face back to the speaker.

“He says he’s asleep.”

They make the same considering noise, Dr Juno Zeta and her son, a low, thoughtful hum that Cam would recognize anywhere. It is _profoundly_ strange to hear it at what her mind cannot help but think of as the wrong pitch.

“Tell him that Rosetti’s latest article on 6p9.420 is more comprehensive than his,” says Dr Juno Zeta.

Cam shakes her head, cocking her face away again.

“She says Rosetti’s latest article on 6p9.420 is more comprehensive than yours.”

Palamedes bolts upright, cowlick rampant, hand outstretched.

“Put me on,” he intones ominously.

Cam looks at Palamedes. He looks at her.

Cam hands him the phone.

Palamedes exhales tautly.

“ _First_ of all—”


End file.
